Roy Gluckman, expert facilitator and speaker

Leadership facilitator · Speaker

Senior people get unexpectedly emotional in my sessions, and the door opens to the conversation they needed, but didn't see coming.

I work with leadership teams on what gets in the way of them working well together, not on what they need to deliver. I build a space where the hard things can be said, and then worked through.

  • 14Years facilitating
  • 100+Organisations worked with
  • 5Continents worked across, from exco tables to the shop floor

The difference

Why leaders bring me in

01

Trained in the hardest rooms

Fourteen years facilitating identity, exclusion and psychological safety inside organisations. The most emotionally charged rooms in corporate life have taught me how to build safety faster than people expect, and to bring in even the most sceptical.

02

I get past the professional version of people

Most sessions produce disclosure that has already been edited for the room. Mine get to what people actually think about the work, each other and themselves. That is where the useful information has been all along, often for years.

03

Everyone speaks, not only the confident

The loudest view in a room is usually the one everyone already knows. I build sessions so the quiet, the anxious and the sceptical are all heard, because that is usually where the thing you needed to know has been sitting.

Stream 01

Leadership Team Facilitation

EXHALE is a team cohesion session for intact leadership teams: a half or full day of deliberate space to connect, and to look at the undercurrents that get in the way of working well together. Some teams come to reconnect. Some come to have honest conversations about how they work. Some come to find their footing together through change and uncertainty. It is not a strategy day. It is about connection, space and dialogue.

Read more about EXHALE

Who books this Exco and senior leadership teams, intact teams looking to improve how they perform together, and the HR and people directors who support them.

Teams needing to reconnect

New members joining, a shift in operating model, a hard year, or simply a long stretch since this team last properly talked. Space to reconnect as people, rebuild trust, and remember why you work well together.

  • Space to name the pressure a team is carrying
  • Rebuilding trust after a demanding period
  • Reconnecting as people, not just colleagues
Half or full day · Enquire

Teams in change

Restructure, merger, new leadership, new strategy. The moment people start guarding position and guessing, exactly when a team most needs to be straight with each other.

  • Naming what is actually uncertain
  • What we can still trust in each other when the ground shifts
  • Connection as a way to feel steadier through change
Half or full day · Enquire

Teams leading change

For any team responsible for driving change: programme teams, functional leads carrying a new operating model into the business. Space to step back from delivery, look honestly at the impact on people, on ways of working and on yourselves, and reconnect to why the change matters.

  • The human impact of a new operating model
  • Reconnecting to the vision behind the change
  • Bringing stakeholders with you, not just informing them
Half or full day · Enquire

Teams in distress

Something has gone wrong. A fallout between two people that everyone is working around, trust lost after a bad decision, or a team that has quietly stopped being able to talk to each other. The work is naming what actually happened, letting people say what they have been carrying, and rebuilding enough between them to work together again.

  • Conflict that has gone underground
  • Saying the thing nobody has said
  • Rebuilding trust after a breakdown
Half or full day · Enquire

Selected clients

NissanNedbankJoe PublicContinentalZutari
FormatHalf or full day, designed to your brief after one conversation
Group sizeBest under 25
DeliveryIn person
Enquire about this

Stream 02

Culture and DEIB

This stream covers culture and DEIB: keynotes, awareness sessions, masterclasses and longer form training programmes. It runs from what uncertainty is doing to workplaces right now through to the identity topics organisations have always found hardest to talk about. People leave understanding something about themselves, and something about each other.

Who books this Heads of culture and DEI, internal communications, employee resource groups, and L&D and wellness teams, usually against a culture programme or an observance calendar.

Caution or courage

Culture when everything feels uncertain.

Uncertainty has stopped being an event and become the atmosphere. Under it people move into survival mode: they trust less, share less and take fewer chances, and an organisation’s range quietly narrows. At the same time uncertainty pushes us to flatten complexity into binaries, us and them, leadership and staff, the old guard and the new, because picking a side feels like solid ground. This session looks at what that is costing you, and at the two things leaders can still offer when they cannot offer certainty: balance and choice.

  • Uncertainty as atmosphere, not event
  • How pressure turns colleagues into camps
  • Leading when you cannot promise certainty
45 to 60 min · Enquire

Psychological safety

Unpacking psychological safety: to feel safe is to thrive. Why capable teams stay quiet about what they can see clearly, and how safe relationships turn a workplace into one of trust, support and real performance.

  • What silence is telling you
  • Safety as performance, not comfort
  • Disagreement without damage
45 to 60 min · Enquire

Belonging

Belonging as behaviour, not atmosphere. What it actually asks of an organisation, why the people who have it rarely notice, and the everyday signals that quietly tell others they do not.

  • Belonging, inclusion and tolerance
  • The everyday signals that exclude
  • Belonging as a leadership habit
45 to 60 min · Enquire

Unconscious bias

For anyone making people decisions: hiring, promotion, dismissal. We look at how bias forms around what feels safe, familiar, valuable and likeable, and how that quietly shapes who gets chosen.

  • What bias is, and what it is not
  • Where bias enters a people decision
  • Interrupting bias in the moment
45 to 60 min · Enquire

LGBTIQA+

Three sessions, matched to where your organisation is: from the foundations and Pride basics through to supporting queer families and embedding safety and belonging for LGBTIQA+ colleagues.

  • Terminology, clearly explained
  • Heteronormativity and “common sense”
  • Active allyship, not passive support
45 to 60 min · Enquire

Masculinity

Often run for International Men’s Day. How traditional expectations of masculinity shape men’s wellbeing, leadership and working relationships, and what men can do to build healthier, more inclusive cultures.

  • The impact of traditional masculinity at work
  • Authenticity and vulnerability for men
  • Men as active allies for gender equity
45 to 60 min · Enquire

Generational diversity

Many managers feel they are managing on eggshells around Gen Z. This session moves from fear to understanding: what drives each generation, where the tensions really come from, and how to harness what younger colleagues bring.

  • What each generation actually wants
  • Inter-generational tension, decoded
  • Gen Z as a catalyst, not a problem
45 to 60 min · Enquire

Sexual harassment and bullying

Beyond simple answers. The grey areas and real organisational complexity of sexual harassment, harassment and bullying, with clear frameworks and evidence-based strategies to help people create safer workplaces with confidence.

  • Where the lines really sit
  • Power, silence and speaking up
  • Responding well when it happens
45 to 60 min · Enquire

Disability and neurodiversity

The shift from basic accessibility to genuine belonging. Cutting through the nuance of disability and neurodiversity, with clear frameworks on inclusive language and the confidence leaders need to build a culture where everyone feels valued.

  • Accessibility versus belonging
  • Inclusive language, with confidence
  • Neurodiversity at work
45 to 60 min · Enquire
FormatKeynote, awareness session, masterclass or longer programme
Session length45 to 60 min, or built into a series
AudienceAll staff, ERGs, people leaders
Enquire about this

Stream 03

Executive Education

Every leader now leads diversity: of background, generation, identity, culture and opinion. Diversity and identity fundamentally shape how we see our own value, and the value of others. To unlock the value of a diverse team, a leader needs to understand identity, history, the baggage we carry and the voices we have internalised. Leading inclusively means seeing beyond the colleague to the human being: complex, nuanced and shaped by all of it. But it starts with how I see myself. Seeing my own humanity, and understanding how that complexity shapes the way I lead. Most leadership programmes never create the space for this. Mine fills that gap.

Available as guest lectures, modules and programme contributions for MBA, EMBA and leadership development audiences.

Who books this Programme directors, faculty leads and executive education teams at business schools, universities and corporate academies.

Flagship module

Inclusive Leadership

It builds self-awareness first, how leaders lead themselves, then the inclusive leadership skillset: practical skills for creating psychological safety in diverse teams, so that difference becomes a source of cohesion and high performance rather than friction.

The gold standard is a two-day module. Also available as a shorter guest session or programme contribution.

  • Self-awareness: what I carry and how it shapes how I lead
  • Identity, value and how diverse teams show up
  • Creating psychological safety across difference
Two days · Read more

Module

Leading Without Certainty

What uncertainty is doing to leaders, to the people they lead, and to the way an organisation works across itself. The module names the atmosphere, looks honestly at how it has been shaping a leader’s own behaviour without their consent, and replaces the false promise of certainty with three things a leader can actually offer: balance, transparency and safety.

Reflective in the first half, practical in the second. Two days as the gold standard, or a shorter guest session.

  • What uncertainty does to the body, the mind and behaviour
  • How the binary reflex hardens into silos
  • Balance, transparency and safety as the alternative to certainty
Two days · Read more

Selected clients

University of Stellenbosch Business SchoolEnterprises University of Pretoria
FormatTwo-day module, or shorter guest session
DeliveryIn person or virtual
AudienceMBA, EMBA and leadership development cohorts
Enquire about this
HPUnileverMercedes-BenzToyotaHeinekenAllianzBoschAmgenRed HatIndeedHogan LovellsHerbert Smith FreehillsCovingtonOgilvyNissanBridgestoneContinentalVodacomNedbankAbsaBarloworldZainZettleMcCain

Method

How I work

01

I feel what a room is carrying

I can feel the emotion, tension and potential in a group. Naming it gently unlocks the real conversation: unspoken needs, unquestioned habits, the stories we carry into work.

02

I work with a power informed lens

Most facilitation asks for openness without counting the risk. I work with a trauma informed view of identity, power and risk, so people move from performed vulnerability to real connection.

03

I make complex things simple

Cohesion, psychological safety, inclusion and vulnerability are crowded with jargon. I make them clear enough to use.

04

I hold space with nuance

My approach is a secured softness. No blame, no shame. Just a deeply human understanding that people are complicated, and that how we show up at work is shaped by far more than work.

Why it matters

What goes unsaid between people does not disappear. It leaks into execution and into the layers below. Surfacing it is the difference between a team that works and a team that works well.

Portrait of Roy Gluckman

About

The hardest rooms in corporate life.

I spent fourteen years in DEIB facilitation. Those rooms deal in identity, exclusion, shame and the fear of getting it wrong in front of colleagues. They are the most emotionally exposed spaces most organisations ever create, and running them well teaches you something that transfers everywhere.

What it taught me is how to feel into a space. To hear the words being said and, underneath them, the fears and hesitations shaping what does not get said. Often the group itself does not know those things are there. My work is to surface them gently, make them visible, and make it safe enough for the room to deal with them.

DEIB work also taught me something I did not expect. In rooms where people share who they are and where they come from, something shifts between them. Given a deliberate space to talk about our humanity, colleagues stop being roles to each other. The relationships go deeper, trust builds faster, and teams hold together in a way no process can produce on its own.

Download bio and one-pager

Roy facilitating a small leadership group
Leadership group facilitation
Roy on stage at a large conference
Conference stage
Roy Gluckman

Tell me what the room needs to leave with.

Twenty minutes is usually enough to work out whether I'm the right person for it, and I will tell you if I am not.

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